Developing Through Relationships

Paper $32.00ISBN: 9780226256597
Published
August 1993
For sale only in the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and Canada

This accessible book explains how individuals develop through their relationships with others. Alan Fogel demonstrates that human development is driven by a social dynamic process called co-regulation—the creative interaction of individuals to achieve a common goal. He focuses on communication—between adults, between parents and children, among non-human animals, and even among cells and genes—to create an original model of human development.

Fogel explores the origins of communication, personal identity, and cultural participation and argues that from birth communication, self, and culture are inseparable. He shows that the ability to participate as a human being in the world does not come about only with the acquisition of language, as many scholars have thought, but begins during an infant's earliest nonverbal period. According to Fogel, the human mind and sense of self start to develop at birth through communication and relationships between individuals.

Fogel weaves together theory and research from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive science. He rejects the objectivist perspective on development in favor of a relational perspective: to treat the mind as an objective, mechanical thing, Fogel contends, is to ignore the interactive character of thinking. He argues that the life of the mind is a dialogue between imagined points of view, like a dialogue between two different people, and he uses this view to explain his relational theory of human development.

Developing through Relationships makes a substantial contribution not only to developmental psychology but also to the fields of communication, cognitive science, linguistics, and biology.

PrefacePart I: Communication processes1. Introduction and perspectiveRelational perspectiveDevelopmental perspectiveCultural perspectiveAbout this book2. The origins of communication, self and cultureGuiding principlesCommunication, self and culture in infancyProposals for a relational perspective on infant development3. The communication system: co-regulation and framingCo-regulationConsensual frames4. The communication system: history and metaphorSystems and interdependenceMetaphors in social and developmental psychologyThe fundamental problem of being-in-relation5. A model of communication: meaning and informationDiscrete and continuous models of communicative informationInformation in continuous process communication systemsPart II: The relationship processes6. The formation of relationships: creating new meaningModels of relationship formationCreativity in relationshipsConclusions7. The formation of relationships: differences between dyadsProcesses of self-organization within relationshipsA dynamic model of consensual framing in relationshipsThe formation of differences between relationshipsConclusions: two patterns of relationship formation8. The self in relation: embodied cognitionEmbodied cognitionParticipatory cognitionImaginative cognitionInfant cognition and its development9. The self in relation: self and otherThe dialogical self in adultsThe dialogical self in infancyThe dialogical self is co-regulated10. Culture as communication: stability and changeCulture as a processCulture and infancy11. Conclusions and implicationsDevelopmental determinism and indeterminismForms of information: morality, aesthetics and affiliationResearch approaches to relationship developmentBibliographyGeneral indexName index

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